Touchstone – Wintercoast                   9/10

By Mike Flavin

Touchstone is a five-piece group from the U.K. that has been getting quite a bit of attention over the last several years, and it’s easy to see why; a terrific debut album Discordant Dreams (their first full-length, not counting the EP Mad Hatters), followed by a string of successful gigs, and the buzz was on!

The music business is littered with the wreckage of countless artists that come out of the gate with all cylinders firing, only to crash and burn when attempting to follow their own act. Not so with Touchstone – with Wintercoast, they’ve not only got past the sophomore album jinx, they’ve left it in the dust. Whereas Discordant Dreams showed the band’s influences almost a little too prominently in the sense that certain portions could be picked out as sounding similar to one band or another, Wintercoast lacks a little of the previous album’s pop flavor but is a much more original work.

It’s hard to pick out the highlights of an album that really doesn’t have any low spots, but there are some truly standout moments. Sandwiched between two epics (the opening title number is preceded by a narration by actor Jeremy Irons) is a selection of tracks that run the gamut from the hard rocking riff of “Strange Days” (my pick for most commercial potential) to the delicate ballad “Solace”, with a few turns along the way for the slightly psychedelic “Voices” and “Zinomorph’s” dancing bass line. Everyone gets a chance to shine throughout the album, and moving singer Kim Seviour to the forefront gives the instrumentalists the room to infuse each number with tremendous intensity and drive; Rob Cottingham’s lead vocals are effective as well, adding a tougher male voice to complement to Kim’s impressive range. Beside the aforementioned opening and closing epics, the album hits a high point in the middle with Kim’s emotional performance on the powerful ballad “Original Sin”.

Touchstone brings the ‘Rock’ to progressive rock, sounding tight and polished with grand sweeping crescendos and jettisoning the directionless noodling found in a lot of prog music. Their sound owes less to 70’s prog than to the music bands such as Yes & Genesis were making in the 80’s, along with the funky bass and big keyboard & guitar sounds of that decade’s pop bands like Duran Duran & Talk Talk. Add in a healthy dose of heavy rock drumming and an absolute gem of a female lead vocalist, and you’ll be in the ballpark of the Touchstone sound.

Touchstone is a young band doing everything right – their terrific combination of melody and harmony with hard rock (and the elusive quality known as ‘prog’) sets them apart from almost any other new group on the scene, and Wintercoast is an album that brilliantly puts it all together. The production is flawless, the songwriting is seamless, and the performances show a band that is totally confident in their own ideas and their presentation. In short, this album is one of the finest I’ve heard this year.

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